1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to ballast discharge equipment for use in depositing ballast material on a rail bed. In particular, the present invention relates to a computer controlled ballast discharge system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the late 1980""s, the Burlington Northern Railroad Company initiated the development of a new type of automated ballast railcar. These railcars are operated in unit train groups and have improved the efficiency of ballast unloading by allowing workers to unload a 54-car train with only two employees, and which allowed the ballast discharge operation to be conducted at generally walking speed. The trains could unload in approximately 6 to 9 hours of track time over a period of two days. The automated unit train concept improved the cycle time on the cars (which is the time period from load to reload) dramatically from about 20 days to less than 5 days. Furthermore, it allowed operations to be conducted with fewer employees, which is beneficial from a cost and safety standpoint. By 1997, the successor to the Burlington Northern Railroad Company, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company (xe2x80x9cBNSFxe2x80x9d) was using automated ballast trains to improve efficiency. This allowed the retiring of old ballast cars from the fleet. There are two types of cars generally used by BNSF. One utilizes an electrical system in which the discharge gates are radio controlled, and the other utilizes a hydraulic system in which the discharge gates are hydraulically controlled. On cars with hydraulic gates, some of the gates may be radio controlled and some may be manually controlled with actuating handles on the side of the car.
Of course, it is always desirable to operate at higher rates and with fewer personnel. The present invention is directed to an improvement to the prior art automated ballast discharge railcars.
There is a need for an improved railroad ballast discharge system that utilizes global position systems (xe2x80x9cGPSxe2x80x9d).
It is one objective of the present invention to utilize GPS in combination with an automatic ballast discharge railcar in order to further improve ballast discharge operations by increasing the speed of operations, by reducing the number of personnel required, and by providing for relatively well controlled predictable depositions of ballast.
It is another objective of the present invention to provide an improved ballast discharge system which allows at least one controller and at least one GPS receiver to receive global position data from global position satellites, to read the global position data, to compare the global position data to global position information recorded in program memory, and to open and close discharge gates of a plurality of ballast railcars in a pre-programmed and pre-determined manner in order to deposit ballasts at pre-selected portions of the rail line and to not deposit ballast in other pre-selected portions of the rail line.